


L'Esprit Noelle

by luvanderwon



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas Party, F/F, Genderswap, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:35:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2791811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvanderwon/pseuds/luvanderwon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s barely ten pm but Grantaire and Enjolras have been making out for over half an hour, and Enjolras is already losing her shirt. Nobody can explain to Combeferre how this situation has arisen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	L'Esprit Noelle

It’s barely ten pm but Grantaire and Enjolras have been making out for over half an hour, and Enjolras is already losing her shirt. Nobody can explain to Combeferre how this situation has arisen. Or rather, nobody can explain to Combeferre how this situation has arisen without repeatedly giggling “starbursts” or breaking into a round of _All I Want For Christmas_. Perhaps, in seeking answers from Félicie Courfeyrac and Marie Pontmercy, Combeferre is asking the wrong questions of the very wrong people. 

If by _wrong_ you mean _inebriated_ , which in this instance, Combeferre most certainly does. 

She hates Christmas parties. 

Last year, Bossuet got her leg stuck in a window, Enjolras got into the worst shouting match with someone Combeferre had never met, and Grantaire drank an entire bottle of cherry brandy and threw up in Courfeyrac’s bed. Cherries were ruined for months; brandy out forever. The year before that Bahorel and Feuilly had started a bar fight that somehow got all of them banned from three different venues, two of which they hadn’t even been in, and Bossuet cut her face and left hand open on a bottle which nobody had seen break. Eponine had kissed Cosette and Marie had cried, and all that was before Jehanne and Bahorel had climbed up on a tombstone in the cemetery they were all lounging beside the wall of while Joly fretted about foreign bodies and did her best to bandage her girlfriend’s hand – and started slam-rapping about equality at Christmas. The year before _that_ , Combeferre had been bailing her best friends out of the police station at three in the morning on Christmas Eve. 

Somehow, walking into the front room of Feuilly’s tiny apartment and seeing Enjolras and Grantaire making out like teenagers is worse than all three of those last years combined. 

She asks Joly and Bossuet and they tell her it was a game of dare – Joly starts a rant on the inherent dangers of dare and that one time a friend of hers ended up with a broken arm from a dare that went wrong. “Took three months to mend,” she elaborates, and fondles her own forearm. “Gives me pins and needles just thinking about it.” Bossuet laughs and catches her elbow, kisses her ear and whispers something sticky and obscene. Combeferre moves on. 

She asks Bahorel, who laughs so hard she cries, and waves her on past with tears in her eyes. She asks Feuilly, who rolls her eyes and say “mistletoe” in a tone that implies “doom, disaster and threats on your firstborn”. She asks Jehanne, who sparkles and giggles and recites a line of what Combeferre thinks might be Browning but could equally be Tennyson. Either way, it’s Victorian, and it’s inherently wrong for Enjolras and Grantaire, but Prouvaire has always been a romantic. 

She asks Courfeyrac, again, and Courf grabs hold of the lapels of Combeferre’s shirt, stumbles closer and presses her nose into Combeferre’s cheek – chilled tip nudging warm, sober skin, and shapes words against the corner of Combeferre’s mouth. “Enj started it,” she grins, and Combeferre doesn’t believe that. 

Correction: she doesn’t _want_ to believe that. 

However, over Courfeyrac’s shoulder she can see Grantaire’s palm smoothing over Enjolras’s mostly-bare shoulder – slim, dark fingers cupping reverently around the soft, pale skin; thumb catching like the twist in a tale under the black elastic of Enjolras’s exposed bra strap. She can see Enjolras press closer, clambering almost on to Grantaire’s lap, her body falling forward with an impulse borne of mingled alcohol, gravity and apparent desire, her knees scudding rough against the carpet either side of Grantaire’s hips. She sees Enjolras’s hands slide up and get messy in Grantaire’s midnight quarrel of curls. She sees the tiny prickle of a starlight smile in the corner of her best friend’s mouth. 

Combeferre tucks Courfeyrac in safely against her side. She can feel Courf’s throbbing, humming excitement – seasonal gossip and happiness and ill-advised snogging – these things Courfeyrac lives for, breathes in; dines out on for weeks. “I believe that,” Combeferre tells her, and wishes she didn’t. 

*

Aurélie Marianne Enjolras is blonde all the way down. 

Grantaire has known this for nearly six weeks but it still feels like Christmas has come early every time she gets to see. Especially now, with sugar rum cherries on their lips and fairy lights strung up over the mattress in the corner of the room which serves her as bedroom and studio. Grantaire has never celebrated Christmas before, beyond getting outrageously drunk with a reason other people approved of, for once. This year, for the first time, with Enjolras’s arms around her belly and her chin hooked over her shoulder and tucked against her the wishbone of her collar, Grantaire feels for the first time that she has something to celebrate. 

It isn’t getting Enjolras in bed (although that has been spectacular, of course). It isn’t getting Enjolras to admit that she cares after months – years – of carefully constructed walls of indifference and loaded silences, heavy with a weight of unacknowledged potential. It isn’t even the discovery that Enjolras is blonde all the way down. Grantaire’s celebration this year is two-fold: she has something to leave her cell block apartment for which isn’t alcoholic, and that something has learned how to talk about personal feelings. 

They started on the Pont Neuf, because all good romances in Paris start on the Pont Neuf, or so Jehanne says. Enjolras was going left and Grantaire was going right, and they’d have walked past one another with a nod and a brief hello if that businessman hadn’t crashed into Enjolras and elbowed her sideways, spilling her fair trade organic coffee in its fair trade organic re-usable travel mug all over her fair trade organic hemp cotton shirt. Grantaire had stepped in to abuse him for his kindness, not that he’d heard, and her fingers had spidered themselves out protectively over Enjolras’s elbow before either of the women had noticed. “Are you hurt?” Grantaire had frowned, her face too close in the space of the bridge, grey stone fanning out behind and in front of them; a Gaussian blur of harried Parisians and tourists weaving around them. Enjolras had felt like a stone on a riverbed, and noticed how green Grantaire’s eyes are. 

“I’m ok,” she’d said, and then her fingers had clenched up tight around the perimeter of her travel mug. There was coffee staining her shirt and Grantaire’s hand on her elbow and they were standing in the middle of the Pont Neuf on a November afternoon when Aurélie Marianne Enjolras asked Grantaire out for the first time. “Just – I’m late anyway,” she’d shrugged one shoulder, “and I can’t go to class like this, so let’s – I mean, do you want to – would you? Coffee?” 

Grantaire had said yes, of course, and kept her hand on Enjolras’s elbow all the way back to the Sorbonne district and a coffee house which wasn’t the Musain or the Corinthe but still served fair trade organic fresh-ground French-pressed. 

“You’re surprisingly friendly,” Grantaire had observed when they were sat at a table almost behind the counter in a cramped little room furnished with scuffed woodwork and red curtains, unlit candles preserved in static dripping formations on a mantelpiece in front of a foxed mirror. The barista was playing 90s Britpop – _Champagne Supernova_ and _Disco 2000_. “Not – you know – hating everything I say to you. There’s a distinct lack of your hateful, I’m-judging-you gaze today. Was shouting at a clumsy suit all I needed to do to get in your good graces, Athena?”

“I didn’t know it was something you were in the habit of doing,” Enjolras had raised one blonde eyebrow and Grantaire had been glad to be sitting down. She’d pressed her knees together tight against the rush of warmth between her legs, and solemnly remembered to keep breathing. “R,” Enjolras had gone on, the smallest of frowns puckering her pale, warrior’s brow. Grantaire pressed the tip of her tongue against her teeth. Enjolras never used her nickname. “I don’t hate you, you know.” 

She’d laughed. “Sure.” 

“I mean, I hate when you call me Athena. I hate how you make me feel. I hate the flippant, careless, drunk person you hide behind most of the time, and the reckless, unreliable version of yourself you present to the world, but I don’t hate _you_.” 

Grantaire had raised her own eyebrow then, along with her cup of strong black, up to her lips for a quick sip of bitter liquid to burn down her throat and make those words easier to swallow. “Sure sounds like it,” she’d quipped, and smirked, and Enjolras had sighed and tapped her fingers on the table. 

“I hate it when you do _that_ ,” she’d added, frost and flame tugging at the corners of her mouth. 

“Do what?” Grantaire demanded, then – Enjolras’s constant disapproval catching up with her – “wait, how I make you feel? How do I make you feel?” 

Enjolras had looked at her, eyes blue where Grantaire’s were green; hair pristine and golden and heroic where Grantaire’s was wicked and ink black and squalling. “Like I can be so much more than I am,” she said, flatly fierce; determinedly resigned. “And like I want to, so one day you won’t be able to prove me wrong anymore.” 

“I,” Grantaire had almost laughed, before the sound got stuck in her mouth. “What?” 

“I love the way you argue with me,” Enjolras had admitted, and her cheeks had bled a delicate, dog rose pink which Grantaire had never seen before. “I know you do it mostly because you think I’m an idealistic idiot – and maybe I am – but I love it and at the same time I hate it, because it doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You’ve always got a counterpoint. And in the end, I always run out of words first.”

“No, you don’t,” Grantaire was confused and desperate to please. “No, I just make shit up, I just – wait, what, you’re telling me you _enjoy_ the way we argue at meetings? You _like_ that?” 

“Not because I like arguing with you,” Enjolras had sprung to her own defensive, cheeks pinking further and Grantaire had known red was her colour, but hot damn. “I do, sometimes, because it’s the only time you get passionate and that’s – I like that – but, you know, I just... I appreciate someone not just telling me I’m great all the time because they like my ideas or my face.”

“Yeah, must be tough having people like your face and think you’re awesome,” Grantaire had muttered. Then, because she was Grantaire and this was what she did and it was why she couldn’t have nice things, she quipped half her mouth in a smirk and added “so you like me best when I’m passionate, do you?” 

Enjolras sighed, short and stroppy, and folded her arms over her coffee-stained chest. “Obviously,” she snapped, like it was a challenge. “That’s when you’re most beautiful.” 

“Thought the only beauty you were interested in was the beauty of a fairer world,” Grantaire quoted, because being a dick was easier than actually responding. 

“Did I say that?” Enjolras screwed up her mouth as she tried to remember. “It sounds like the sort of shit I come out with when you distract me with your flawless shooting down every speech I make.” 

“I distract you,” Grantaire had laughed then, because this was a sham or a set up, this was April Fools’ Day gone Novembral; this was ridiculous and unfair and she was going to be wanking about it for weeks but that didn’t make it _nice_. “What the ever-loving fuck.” 

“Grantaire,” Enjolras had said, in that voice she used when Courfeyrac was too much fun or Combeferre was too much good sense, or Jehanne was too much poetry. “You are too much in need of some self-belief.”

“Yeah?” Grantaire cocked her head to the side. She’d forgotten her coffee. “Well, you’re too much self-belief and nothing else, Athena. Maybe you could loan me some.” 

“Yes,” Enjolras had said, affably. “Maybe I could.” 

Grantaire hadn’t realised self-belief lived on a person’s tongue. She supposed it made sense, since it was all about the words you used and how you spoke to yourself. Certainly, she did feel a minute sliver of the stuff like mercury in her belly a little later, when Enjolras’s hands were anchored on her hips and her tongue slid inside Grantaire’s mouth to share some of that excessive reserve of self-belief, as promised and requested. 

That’s how they had started. With spilt coffee and self-belief, and a suit on the Pont Neuf in the middle of November. 

Nearly six weeks later, Grantaire has already grown used to not mentioning it. There’s a simmering heat in her belly which wants, all the time, to sing it to the world from the rooftops, that Aurélie Marianne Enjolras kisses with her eyes closed and swears like a fucking demon into her fist when she comes. She wants to gloat to everyone she’s ever met and all the ones she’ll never meet that Aurélie Marianne Enjolras is blonde all the way down and that she, Grantaire, has been all the way down again, and again, and again. She wants to whisper in Courfeyrac’s ear that all her guesses were wrong, that Enjolras is pushy and demanding and dictatorial in bed, liberty is out the window between the sheets and Grantaire fucking loves it, loves being told what to do. 

It’s only a simmering heat, though, because the real fire comes from higher up, flames in her chest which remind her it can’t last, that Enjolras is Athena, she’s wisdom and reason and war, while Grantaire is only one out of three and it’s not wisdom or reason. This is an indulgence, a pretty fantasy made physical for five glorious minutes, but it can’t last because Grantaire is everything Enjolras hates – cynical and miserable and so done with hope. She smokes and she drinks and she fucks around while Enjolras is glory and light and the flaming sword of a better future; there is no way this can ever be anything but a cheap fascination, a quick hit for Enjolras, getting her rocks off and her ideals shot down until she gets bored of the latter and looks elsewhere for the former. 

She didn’t expect Enjolras to grab her at Les Amies’ Fantaisie L’Esprit Noel and kiss her right in front of everyone she cares about. 

(Well, that’s not quite true because Enjolras cares about everyone the world over and especially the poor and the disenfranchised and, she’s been insisting lately, especially Grantaire, but Grantaire had told herself that was a dream of a hallucination of a facsimile vision, because why would Enjolras _care_ like _that_ about _her_?) 

Whispered pillow-creased concepts aside, Grantaire most definitely had not been expecting this – this full-frontal snogging in the middle of Feuilly’s living room with Courfeyrac whooping and laughing and the very identifiable sound of money changing hands; Bossuet’s groaning at handing over hard-earned cash and Jehanne’s drizzling giggle about something poetic. She had not been expecting Enjolras to make it thick and filthy and not even consider protesting when Grantaire pushed her green tartan shirt off her shoulder and toyed with her bra strap (because as long as they’re pushing boundaries, which apparently they are tonight, she’s game for the challenge). She had not been expecting Enjolras to push her hair behind her ear with slim, tender fingers, and press the heat of her mouth there next to Grantaire’s temple and lick “let’s go home now,” the words slippery and damp and going straight to her groin. Grantaire can feel herself getting wet right here on Feuilly’s living room floor and it should be awkward and it should be strange because it’s Enjolras, but it’s not because Grantaire knows that Enjolras is blonde all the way down and three nights ago she had Grantaire bound to her headboard and groaning, humming obscenities at the ceiling. 

They’d tripped out amid catcalls and raised glasses and Enjolras – Aurélie Marianne _fucking_ Enjolras – had actually flipped Bahorel off over her shoulder, the fingers of her other hand gripping tight to Grantaire’s belt. 

Back in Grantaire’s cloudy, miniature apartment room with its squall of spilt oil paints and scrubland of unfinished canvases, clothes tumbling out of crates and boxes because she doesn’t own any furniture, Enjolras tugs her down on the mattress and shoves her cold hands up inside Grantaire’s t shirt. She tucks her nose into the crease of Grantaire’s neck and breathes out, hot and heady with Feuilly’s spiced wine, and says “I want you to fuck me so the neighbours can hear.” 

“You want me to – you’re drunk,” Grantaire laughs, and trickles her fingers down the bones of Enjolras’s spine. 

“Mm, I’m not,” Enjolras giggles, and she is, because Les Amies’ Christmas party is the one time of the year when Enjolras lets herself have more than a sensible glass or two with dinner. “I just want them to hear, R. I want everyone to hear. I want everyone to know.” 

“That I’m fucking you?” 

“Nooo,” Enjolras slips sideways against the unmade bustle of blankets where Grantaire sleeps and tugs her down too, cradling Grantaire’s head against her chest and tangling her fingers in the charcoal whimsy of her hair. She threads her fingers and pulls gently, like she’s carding silk wool. “I want them to know that we’re fucking. There’s a difference.” 

“Is there, then?” 

“Mm.” She giggles again, and peers down at Grantaire, who watches her like she’s an absolution. She’s never seen Enjolras like this – wonders if anyone has ever seen Enjolras like this before. “Did you see ’Ferre’s face?” she chuckles, and the sound is rum-breathed and round in her mouth. Grantaire wants to kiss the plum and cinnamon from between her teeth; tease out all the flavours Feuilly liberally indulges her Christmas drinks with from the tip of Enjolras’s tongue. “She was so... haha. She was... hm.” 

“She was horrified,” Grantaire supplements, drily. 

“Noo, no no,” Enjolras shakes her head and then suddenly spreads all her limbs out wide, a shrug of ankles and wrists across the sheets; opening herself up like a snow angel. “She was _amazed_. Are you going to fuck me yet? I want you to fuck me, I want the neighbours to hear, I want Combeferre to hear, I want the whole of Paris to hear.” 

Grantaire sits up and wraps her arms around her legs, leans her chin on her knees, watching Enjolras in the brash white light of the bulb in her ceiling. She’s never bothered to invest in a lampshade. “You won’t be saying that in the morning,” she says, softly. “And Combeferre was definitely horrified.” 

“Well,” Enjolras says, gazing up at Grantaire like she’s the eighth wonder of the world. “More fool her.” 

“Enj...” 

“No, you,” Enjolras waves her finger impatiently in front of her own face. “Shh. I don’t care, ok,” she sits upright suddenly, folding her legs and reaching out to take Grantaire’s face in both hands, and her eyes have gone serious with conviction and affirmation, like they do when she gets on the stand, gets herself an audience. Grantaire feels heat pooling between her thighs again. “I don’t care whether Combeferre was horrified or ecstatic or whatever she was, ok, because she’s my best friend, sure, but that doesn’t give her any say over who I get to fall in love with, ok? Anyway,” she shakes her head on a graceful, snuffling snort. “She chose Courfeyrac so she’s got nothing to say about taste.” 

Grantaire’s mind spins like she’s looking down from the tip of Montmartre, like she’s taken one step too many at the top of the stairs; like she’s had five times as much wine as she’s really consumed. “I,” she starts weakly, then laughs and clears her throat, and goes for “you’re drunk,” again. 

This time, Enjolras looks her straight in the eyes and says, slow and soft and serious: “I’m not, though.”


End file.
